Medical presentation in Uganda

The congress ( IST-Africa ) was a success and it gave the chance to meet and network with wonderful people (NGOs, doctors, students, ... ). Let's not forget that the main point of these type of events is to help out and work together with the emerging communities and countries. At least that's what it should be.

That being said, the presentation of Medical HIS and EMR, had very good comments. We explained the way we are implementing on rural Argentina. We are now in contact with local doctors from Africa and they are willing to work on the localisation of Medical for different countries in that continent.

Many health professionals told me how useful Medical would be for epidemiology studies on HIV / AIDS. The strong focus on the family medicine and socioeconomics, together with the use of industry standards (such as ICD-10) and its scalability makes Medical a perfect solution for epidemiology studies with large amount of data.

Version 0.0.33 has just been released, with the appointment manager, a great way of visually displaying the appointments for different doctors, specialties and institutions.

In this view, it's easy to look for patient's locations and status in the hospital. The colors visually differentiate the type of admissions.

We have also improve other sections, like vaccinations. Thanks to Andrew Gledhill (NHS) who proposed the addition of the vaccine lot and expiration date. Actually, the vaccine is integrated to the product, so all the production lot, traceability, and procurement is automated. Special controls for vaccine expiration dates have been put in place now.

I could write many pages, but it all comes down to one concept: ethics.
When I talk about Free Software, I talk about not only about freedom, but also community and good will from the software author. The latter probably is the most important one.
You write Free Software because you want to contribute to the community. It's an act of social activism. It's about sharing and helping out.
This April I got a mail from Chris Larsen, a doctor working in Rwanda, where he was asking OpenERP the scripts to upgrade to 6.x, since they needed to have the latest Medical version. The response he got was that the scripts were not publicly available anymore. If they wanted to upgrade, they would have to pay a support contract to OpenERP. This is the typical example of a vendor lock-in. They change the rules (even the license) and then the user becomestheir prisoner.
That very same day I started the implementation of GNU Health (previously called "medical") in the Tryton platform. B…